The good news is that it is clear that there will be no replacement. That is sad as I love my iMac Pro. Don't want to mess with internal hardware or monitor, price was reasonable as compared to other vendor's equivalent systems at the time.
I think the "replacement" for the iMac Pro will be the Apple Silicon version of the 5k iMac and I wouldn't be shocked if that was released as the "new iMac Pro". (whereas even a M1-based 4k iMac would make a credible "regular" iMac). The high-end iMac already beats the entry iMac Pro on raw performance. The case & cooling system are going to be re-designed anyway, and ASi will probably run cooler than any equivalent Intel processor.
Meanwhile, the "hard line" between "Core i" and "Xeon" - things like extra I/O bandwidth, ECC, other stability features and support for >8 cores - are largely down to Intel's marketing strategy- Apple doesn't have to apply the same model to their SoC range - if they want to distinguish product ranges on (say) ECC they can do that at the package or mainboard level, or with chip "binning" which could be more economical than having lots of different CPU dies.
The M1 Macs already have 8 cores (albeit in a 4+4 configuration) and twice the Thunderbolt bandwidth c.f. the 2-4 core models they replace, and give i9 MBPs a run for their money - and they're
just the ultra-portable, entry-level laptops.
I'm also wondering whether the "Pro desktops" will multi-CPU: rather than making chips with > 16 cores and insane GPUs (or supporting dGPUs) just use multiple processors based on the 16" MBP chip.
Problem is - as you say - whatever the replacement will be, it ain't here yet.
With this news, and the recent price drop of existing iMacs among many retailers, surely this points to a new M-Series iMac at the next live event (April?).
I don't think its connected: I suspect that the iMac Pro's fate as a one-off product was sealed back in early 2017 when Apple did a U-turn on making a new Mac Pro. It's just reached the point where Apple need to either upgrade it or dump it (while they've still got enough parts to fulfil their servicing obligations to existing owners). I think the only link between the iMac Pro's discontinuation and Apple Silicon is that it will be obsoleted by an Apple Silicon iMac
sometime in the next 18 months.
I wonder if pro users will want to get burned a third time after the failed 2011 trash can and the 2018 Mac Pro that was again abandoned so quickly. I would hate to have dropped 50k for a Mac Pro only two years ago, not having any upgrade paths and Apple Silicon around the corner.
This - except you mean burned a
4th time:
Burn #1: The 2010 Mac Pro tower only gets a very minor upgrade in 2012 and is actually discontinued in the EU long before the radically-different Trashcan was announced in mid 2013 (and which wasn't widely available until the very end of 2013)
Burn #2: The Trashcan - never upgraded in 6 years (the entry model was rotated out, that's all), no real details of the replacement until mid 2019 - at twice the price.
Burn #3: iMac Pro - never upgraded, discontinued before its replacement was announced.
Burn #4: 2019 Mac Pro - probably only good for 4 years.
I mean, fine, if you bought when they were first released you'll have got a 3-4 year lifecycle out of them and reclaimed the tax/finished the lease (and we know that all MacRumors folk work in perfect companies where the management happily accepts that up-to-date gear pays for itself in productivity /s) but the problem is, at that point, what do you then replace it with if there's no successor
or if the successor demands a radical workflow change
or costs 2x as much? What if you need a new machine (failure/theft/new employee...) mid/late cycle?
Having this happen once was a misfortune, having it happen 4 times seems like carelessness.
